SKFU launches a fund raising operation to hack the vita

Famous PS3/Vita developer SKFU just announced on his blog that he is running a donation drive to get a Vita development kit. Those “kits”, if my understanding is correct, contain a debug device (a special version of the Vita that can run unsigned code), as well as afull SDK and documentation. In the case of the PSP, access to those kits helped dramatically to hack the device, according to SKFU.

They are fairly expensive though (2000 euros), and since SKFU says he has no intent to actually use the kit for anything else than helping the scene, he is asking for the community’s financial contribution to the project. He has also plans (that are kept under wraps due to the legal risk for his contact who will be acquiring the development kit) to give access to that devkit to a number of trusted devs, in order to make fast progress on vita hacking.

So what do you guys think? Are we touching the gray area of hacking here, or is it a fair way to access more knowledge about the Vita? Either way, feel free to donate to SKFU for his project, by checking his blog post here.

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wololo

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As soon as I get some money on my PayPal i will donate. I would donate the entire amount if I had it As for the grey area I’m just concerned of Sony and devs abandoning it like the psp But two questions: 1) How do I donate when he is asking for Euros (I’m US) 2) I called Sony awhile back and said The dev kits would be free for indie devs. Is this true because my company could get one and give it out.

1) Paypal will do the conversion for you, taking US dollars from your credit card, and giving SKFU euros. Just make sure you don’t donate more than you think you are. 2) They are not the same dev kits. The “free” dev kits are for the playstation Suite, and will actually cost a subscription of 100$ a year.

what i see is a sony releasing a beast locked with no plan to revolution the os of it and only wish to profit by the hardware and by releasing each future step by step… so yeay to pass to the grey area of psvita

I haven’t got the psp at launch,but if Sony handled it as the vita than the “pirate haters” who state that hacking the psp killed the system are death wrong.It is not gray at all it might make me not regret buying it.

Lack of dual-sticks neutered first person style games and the PSone games. PS2/PS3 ports suffered even worse (the limited shoulder buttons). But, I heard that the super easy piracy scared many developers off (apparently, the system suffered from very poor software sales?), I think it was more do to lacking quality of said software.

Your friend assumes we have access to hardware that costs closer to 10000$ rather than 2000$. About the wires thing, your friend should get a bit of documentation about the evolution of the motherboards on the psp, before he talks for nothing.

In 6 years in the scene, I’ve seen CPU decap being discussed an awful lot for the PSP, and nobody ever did it. I’ve always assumed the reason was money. I don’t see what would make the PS Vita any different. There’s a difference between what is theoretically doable, and what actually happens. Hardware hackers have access to oscilloscopes, JTAG probing devices, usb sniffers. but they don’t have the funds needed to do a proper decap of the vita’s CPUs, I believe.

I know for a fact geohot is dying to hack the vita. skfu has done some things that tell me ,when he asks for donations the donations dont go where he says.kind of shady just like he did in the ps3 scene.

Aren’t you mixing things up? He asked for donations for some of his hacking tools on the vita. His promise was simple and I believe he kept his words: If X people donate I’ll release the next version. Now, about the “ideas” contest, this has nothing to do with donations, he asked people for ideas about Playstation suite applications they’d like to see, and e said he would give away a game to the best idea. Not sure if that happened, but the donations and his contest are not connected.

I am personally not a big fan of “donate or I won’t publish the next release”, but I think SKFU was clear and honest on that, it’s actually a good way to see if there is some interest for the tool, and if it’s worth pursuing. The donation drive for the devkit, this time, is on a larger scale. I don’t know many hackers who could afford such a kit individually, and ask nothing in return.

I like hardware hacking talks very much and would like to get knowledgeable at all this. Does anyone recommend a book or something I can read about all these things? I am already at university doing a business course, otherwise I’d enter electrical engineering or somehing. But can this be learned on my own? Thank you.

I will not donate. I never put trust on SKFU, he want money for every release and I never saw seriousness in his work. The Vita has few games and few support by software-houses for now and it need time to have the necessary trust to decide to planning more game releases; if it will be hacked soon, the software-houses will stay away from our console. Vita isn’t a mature console, it has 7 months of life and seems that a lot of people pretend to use it like an hacked PSP. It’s too soon to reveal or gave public some hard hacks (good job here Davee) and SKFU want to rush buying an official devkit (and for me they are only words for now). I always support the hacking with moderation (I hate to have a device locked by his house, I like to have it unlocked to gain full performance), I had my PSP hacked from years (the downgrade from 2.71 to 1.50, the devhook… ah, good days) and I’m still on 1.61 on my Vita with Everybody’s tennis, but this time I won’t support the idea of SKFU. It isn’t hacking, it’s just have half of the works done (lazy hackers are not hackers).

In general, I strongly disagree. I understand if people hack for knowledge and proof there concept with some code. But paying a hacker to hack, in essence its this. I don’t like. Whats next exploit only to donators ? Then next step is dongles to hack vita ? Its prolly not his meaning, but from what I read it can’t be sure.

Alot of you are being dumb. If you do not want to donate then don’t. I love my vita using super collapse 3 hack. Love playing the old emulators. I also bought some games for Vita(Disgaea, Army corp so I support the system) Playing emulators adds 1000’s of games to the system. By buying this dev kit will allow modders to leap ahead in there understanding of the system. Unlock the system to its full potential. Not for pirating(wololo does not support) but because it is fun and helps us play homebrew.

I won’t be donating, SKFU hasn’t got the ability to hack the PSV, devkit or not. Just my opinion but SKFU always struck me as blowing smoke when it came to his coding ability and some of his hacking related statements in the past have been absolute comedy.

lol, You need a reality check if you think this site regularly makes 2000 euros in advertising. So how about you open your own blog, put some ads on it, and come back when you made your first 10 euros, so that you can talk about something you know?

It’s not only that too. Sony does not sell the devkit to anybody, you have to have some sort of game company structure. SKFU knows people who do work for such a company, I don’t. Finally, even if I had that devkit, I wouldn’t have the necessary free time to put that stuff to good use.

Why is it that so many people want geohot to do the hacks. He already agreed on avoiding getting busted by not hacking anymore sony hardware, so why think he could get away with it now if he couldnt before?

Also I hope the upcoming vhbl is what I was hoping for (Patapon). I just got nothing else that is logical to port that I have.

The only bad idea, was sony putting guantanamo bay software on a tablet with dual analogs. The latest release of Pro c ad hoc addition proves that sony never intended to offer the best anyway, and to get the most out of YOUR machine you need to rely on software by anyone but them. Expect that from the vitas future ofw’s, horse manure. Keep up the good work scene guys, yall are awesome, it’s much appreciated!

I’ve done some small things here and there and I’m well known in certain area’s of the 360 scene but all of that aside.

Upon lurking for hours upon hours on playstation based websites/blogs/forums over the past few years I haven’t really seen the name SKFU come up to much unless it was something that he could program with ease ( Source for other projects already being released, keys to decrypt things already being out there ).

So basically what I’m trying to say is ( I’m trusting your word on the answer to this question because as far as the work I’ve seen from you and others you work with I do trust your word ) do you really think he’ll make the full use of having a devkit?

Do you really think that it’s going to be that simple to just debug a system at a kernel level (even on a devkit) when it’s most likely going to be protected due to the previous hacking attempts even devkit xbox360’s still needed to be jtaged to have the ability to do certain things such as kernel modification…

Not to mention I don’t think it’s too likely that with that the initial glitch or jtag hacks for the 360 were found via having a devkit in the first place.

What I’m getting at here is I have the funds where I could make this happen for him but I have a lack of trust for the PS3 scene I believe there was someone else recently who said they were going to by a devkit ps3 and help out with hacking that scene and yatta yatta.

Shortly after I also recall their blog just closing randomly after I’d contributed $500 USD to the cause.

I just want someone’s word who I know of from the scene that this is going to happen that if it were your money you’d personally trust it in his hands and to know it’s going to the right cause.

Now by saying “it’s going to happen”, I of course don’t mean the vita being hacked just because this bundle of new utilities and information is at one team’s disposal but rather would trust he’s not going to buy me new retail consoles, hookers, or whatever his fancy may be.

And I also understand where you’re coming from with the whole I’ve got no time for these things anymore, Family comes first before hobbies, business, or the like.

I myself am in a similar position with a pregnant fiance and having to work constantly I just want some sort of confirmation that the money that could be going to my soon to be child is actually going to a proper cause.

If I wasn’t in the situation where work and my fiance populate my life I probably would’ve gotten into the vita hacking scene long ago and probably produced something considering I’ve got the contacts to get the devkit myself.

Which brings me to a final question which is I could get a devkit and ship it to him, however under those circumstances I wouldn’t want to find out later on he’s just using it for his own personal gain rather then research ( I.E. Just making an SNES emulator and using it on this brand new shiny devkit he’s got, then maybe releases it with not potential way of even running the *** on the ps vita for retail users ).

Sorry for the long rant but get back to me whenever you’ve got the time man I’d appreciate it and I wouldn’t mind supporting the cause if I know the money nor the system are falling into the appropriate/right hands and not some jack off.

P.S. Sorry for any typos as well I typed this out from my Asus Transfromer Prime, as the fiance is sleeping and my desktop is in the room.

Hi DeadlyData, those are perfectly fine concerns. The only thing I can answer is that I never personally worked with SKFU, so I cannot give my word on his reliability.

I know he has some knowledge on the PS3 and the vita, but I don’t know if any of that knowledge ever led to something actually useful (he has released a few tools that do work, though). His plan is to share the devkit with other devs whose names are undisclosed, so I don’t know if that can be trusted either. His personal software skills are limited from what I could see (he compensates with good skills in network and hardware), but if the kit ends in the right hands through his sharing system, that could be really useful.

Again, I agree that there are lots of “fishy” things around this donation drive, and even if I discussed with SKFU to give more details, I don’t think there’s much he can do to prove his good faith until the devkit is actually here…

The problem with getting the devkit is less the money than having the right contacts with Sony, and it seems SKFU has that.

What I would do is donate an aount you would not “regret” wasting, and see what happens. If SKFU is honest, he will either give the money back if the donation request fails, or prove quickly that it is correclty used if he gets the required money. If he his dishonest about this, his reputation will go down the toilet (which I personally think is not worth 2000 euro 😀 )

@wololo, I’d consider that the best answer you could give as it seems a lot more experienced people in the scene haven’t really heard of him.

But the same goes with myself and the xbox-scene the more underground people usually tend to have the best contacts and don’t enjoy the spotlight very often.

I honestly wouldn’t regret the 2,000 Euros it’s just a matter of with my budget that could go to better things then my personal hobby of believing information and technology should be freed to it’s full extent.

My fiance wouldn’t mind me doing such either as she fully supports any of my hobbies when it comes to things like this.

I’ll wait for the next few days and see how things are going on his blog if he addresses any of the concerns I’ve had.

And I’ll ask him for some other details such as providing pictures of the Devkit (Maybe the seller would provide him with such a thing for public viewing as long as no unique id’s or identifiers are posted) just to be sure he’s not running of to do other things with those funds.

The reputation he has imo is a to little for him to be doing a fund raiser of this kind as well, if it were someone like you or various other devs in the scene I’d gladly fund it.

But you gotta take risks once in awhile and I guess this is one of those points where you do or you don’t, considering I myself don’t have the time and I’d love to look into development for the VITA in the future I’d love for it to be looked into more.

So as I said in the begging of this I’ll have to wait it out for awhile and make my final choice on whether or not to give a big lump sum of cash to finish the funding or just back away due to my concerns.

You said that you got contacts and can get the devkit yourself and you wouldn’t mind spending 2,000 Euros to the things you want(not so sure about the “My fiance wouldn’t mind”,2000 Euros is a big money to spend onto something not family related)

I say get the devkit yourself and give it to someone you trust.With that, you will also have access to the devkit, whenever you feel like looking into it

ive been reading alot about this cev kit since march-april of last year sony saying this kit is signifily lower priced than the other consoles dev kits and that they encourage “garage devs” to make games, do u really think sony will make this dev kit fully exploitable for the low price of $2000, i mean im sure they are confident in there security mabey thier dev kis are fairly limited also, like limited cpu speed ..like the playstation suite

You know what, given the strange form factor of some of the I/O (usb connection, etc…) of the vita, I am thinking that yes, service mode on the vita is probably accessed by leveraging some of the unused pins in there…